White Chocolate Chip Muffins

This weekend, it was my turn to brave the three hour journey and extortionate ticket prices which are the requirements for a trip to see my boyfriend Tom in Cambridge.  The dessert I made would need to be travel-proof and have minimum decoration but maximum taste.  What could live up to these criteria better than a chocolate muffin with white chocolate chips?

I used the recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook but with chopped up Milky Bar for the white chocolate.  In the spirit of generosity and an even number of cakes, I made sure to divide the mixture between the twelve cases, rather than making a few extra.

Aside from making the kitchen smell of chocolate cake when I brought them out of the oven, the muffins revealed themselves to be sunk in the middle.  This was probably the result of the oven temperature being too low.  Speaking of sinking, the white chocolate chunks had sunk to the bottom, which led to much undignified licking of cake cases.

Despite their imperfections, the cakes were chocolatey, moist and survived the journey to Cambridge.  While this goes to demonstrate their reliable nature, it also helped that they were locked out of the reach of temptation in my suitcase.

White Chocolate and Cranberry Cookies

 My essays have been handed in, a brand new pad of paper opened and the locations of my lectures have been ascertained.  On the wave of these triumphs I indulged in my first baking project of 2012.

I recently discovered something about myself which I had missed for years.  Occasionally the suggestion would spring to mind, but I would ignore it, not daring to believe it could be true.  However, I cannot lie to myself any longer: I love cranberries.  I love them with brie and bacon; I love them in those ‘Eat Natural’ bars with the light blue wrappers; I love them with chocolate.  What I do not like them in is juice, and it was this which put me off of trying them for so long.

 While I was perusing my recipe books over Christmas, dreaming of one day having time to put down a book and pick up a mixing bowl, one recipe kept catching my attention.  It was in The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days and was accompanied by a glossy picture of large, American-style white chocolate and cranberry cookies wrapped in ribbon.  The combination of chewy cookie, sweet white chocolate and strong, fruity cranberry suck in my mind and now, finally free from the clutches of deadlines, I decided to provoke some Christmas memories and try them out.

I do not have a very good record with cookies.  While I will happily play salmonella roulette and risk eating the mixture from the bowl (not something I would recommend, by the way), I am paranoid about exposing anyone else to this by giving them something which has been undercooked.  As such, my cookies are generally overdone and crunchy rather than golden and chewy.  However, I was determined that I would break this curse.

The dough turned out to be very thick; it resembled the cookie dough that is sold in tubes in America, which I decided was probably the right idea.  Following the recipe, I rolled it into large balls containing about two tablespoons of mixture each and put six on a tray with enough space to allow them to spread out.  Peering through the oven door ten minutes later, I saw that a miraculous change had occurred: they had all sunk into, well, cookie-shaped cookies!  The timer went and I took out the first batch.  Cue a dilemma: did they really need to go back in, or was I being paranoid?  I put them back in and waited, tensely. 

Despite an agonising few moments while they were cooling, in which they seemed to be flopping around in an undercooked mess, they hardened up and – a Christmas miracle – were chewy and gooey in all the right places.  The cranberries and chocolate were delicious, particularly caked in cookie goodness, and my housemates, who become endearingly childlike in the face of free cookies, were delighted.

With the cookie curse broken, the Christmas muse offering a final helping hand before December and the cranberry having claimed its rightful place in my affections, it seems that this is the start of a beautiful friendship and, hopefully, a bright baking year.

Christmas Cupcakes

While the majority of my Christmas holidays were taken up with present-buying, Articulate and essays, I found some time to make some cupcakes for Christmas Day.  I wanted to use flavours which taste essentially of Christmas, so I chose the Gingerbread flavoured ones I made for the course Christmas dinner and some original Chocolate Log cupcakes.

Gingerbread Cupcakes

I used the same recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days but for some reason the mixture did not smell quite as ‘Deck the Halls’ as before.  Fortunately, the Christmas muse managed to get me before I dyed the icing bright red; equally as fortunate, Tom’s mum gave me some Christmas-shaped sprinkles to decorate the cakes with, and my grandma gave me the toppers.  I have never used toppers on cupcakes; I think I am naturally drawn to decorations which are edible and preferably made almost entirely of sugar.  However, these looked sweet and were kind of a souvenir which allowed people to have a small reminder of their cake while eating it too.

Chocolate Log Cupcakes

While I doubt the wisdom of adding mint to chocolate and carrot to cake, I have a strong and unwavering belief that chocolate added to more chocolate can only lead to good things.  As such, chocolate logs rank very highly with me.  Originally I intended to make a full-sized and traditional chocolate log (the size of a full-sized standard cake, not a full-sized log) but it seemed somehow more inventive to try and reproduce that distinctive taste in a miniature form.  It was time to see if chocolate logs and cupcakes were a winning team.

For the actual cake I used the chocolate cupcake recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days, as the vanilla cupcake recipe had worked so well in the mini birthday cakes.  While the cakes cooled off after baking, I mixed up the chocolate butter cream for the filling and the icing from the recipe in Love Food: The Cupcake.  I chose this particular book because the vanilla butter cream recipe produced beautiful, light icing and adding chocolate to this seemed like an exceptionally good idea.

Once the cakes were completely cool, I used a small, sharp knife to cut out a little well in the top of each cake.  Each hole had to be deep enough to contain a reasonable amount of filling, but not so deep that it went through the cake and made it split.  Once each had been filled, I replaced the part I had cut out and iced the cakes with a pallet knife.

I used the snowflake-shaped sprinkles to cover the cakes, as I thought the white looked nice on the brown.  I cut a chocolate Flake into sections about a centimetre long, dusted these with icing sugar and put them on the cake.  You may possibly be wondering why I did not dust the whole cake with icing sugar: I had already put the snowflakes on when the Christmas muse (here embodied by my mum) suggested this.  However, I still think they turned out rather nicely and tasted quite similar to the real thing, although next time I might try a solid chocolate topping.

The curse of the dessert struck again, and everyone was so full of potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, turkey and various other birds that no one could manage much dessert.  My granddad, dad and boyfriend managed a gingerbread one each, and my brother had a chocolate log.  Fortunately, Christmas is the best time of year to drag out celebrations, and over the next few days they were forced on various people in the spirit of good will.